Coming off the Mountain

 You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you're thinking that
you're leaving there too soon 
--Sugar Mountain, Neil Young

Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
--Big Rock Candy Mountain, 
Harry McClintock

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We are bidding adieu to Avery County tomorrow, the cool air has provided welcome respite.  Some sundry observations:

--The pool at our lodge played reggae at the pool Tiki bar on an almost continuous loop.  The Tiki bar was somewhat dissonant in the heart of dulcimer and mando folk music, until I looked up into the mountains and thought of Jamaica. Save for the entire milieu and demographics, I might have been in the Blue Mountains; just close your eyes and imagine.

--The local Sugar Mountain featured another odd music festival last weekend featuring dub and crunk, and the aficionados were young mostly white people sporting dreads and pjs, nuevo-Deadheads, we guess.  Ranger sang "Sugar Mountain", Neil Young's song about the need for young people to grow up.  These dub-heads did not appear to be leaving the "mountain" anytime soon, an interesting and somewhat ubiquitous phenomenon of arrested development amongst a contingent of today's youth, supported by entitled Baby Boom parents.

Lastly, dinner tonight at the lovely farm-to-table the Frog and Monkey.  Ranger unfortunately informed the gentle waiter what the crude term "RCH" meant, and asked him if he had been in the service. "No, sir, they wouldn't want me," which met with the retort, "They took me!"

Finally, come dessert time, the chap tried to entice with, among other properties, a cupcake.  Mind you, it is not an adult food, and Sex and the City is probably to fault for the ubiquity of this piffle.  Came Ranger's vociferous reply, "You couldn't PAY me to eat a cupcake!"

"No, sir -- I wouldn't think of it," and the sun began to set on old Appalachian mountains.